Monthly archives for May, 2011

Hello everybody. Morella and Segers at it again. This time with our musings on a unique star of yesteryear.

At her death in late February at the age of 89, Jane Russell was memorialized in the mainstream press with lengthy obituaries fairly dripping with condescension.

“Sultry Star of the 1940’s” read the headline in The New York Times. “Screen Siren” screamed the Los Angeles Times’ headline.

The subtexts seem to suggest that Russell was beneath serious consideration, the bimbo creation and sexual toy of mogul Howard Hughes, who led her leash-like through a good part of her – at best – mediocre career.

We are here to say, loudly, that that interpretation is wrong.

Yes, of course, she was a genuine two-fisted sex symbol. “Of all the screen’s sex goddesses, Jane Russell seemed to be the most amused by the performance,” writes David Thomson, the British film author-critic who is singular in his refreshingly balanced appreciation of her.

“Russell was no actress, but she was dryly skeptical and physically glorious. Such droll eroticism is rare in Hollywood and we are lucky that she was allowed to decorate so many adventure movies.”

We disagree in one respect. Jane was a better actress than even she acknowledged. In addition, she was a talented singer of superb musical taste, and woman of principle who didn’t bend – not even to Howard Hughes.

She was the tomboy daughter of a former actress married to an office manager for the Andrew Jergens Company, which made Woodbury soap. Born in Bemidji, Minnesota, Jane was transported to Glendale, California when she was all of nine months old. The large Russell clan included four younger brothers. It was an active household but hardly an affluent one after Jane’s father died while she was in her teens

A longstanding Hollywood myth is that Hughes had spotted the 19-year-old Russell in 1940, in a chiropodist’s office where she was employed as an assistant, and hired her on the spot to star in “The Outlaw”

As she dryly notes in “My Paths & My Detours,” her 1985 autobiography, Jane did indeed work in the doctor’s office at the time where “I wore a white uniform, took the patients’ shoes and socks off, and stuck their feet in pails of warm water… for a week! Then I gave the chiropodist my regards.”

What actually occurred is this: Jane had been doing some part time modeling in Hollywood for a photographer, Tom Kelley – no nude calendar stuff but lots of outdoorsy ski clothing and other sports-related shots. Posing in front of the camera in a demure bathing suit, Jane “never felt so vulnerable in my life. You see for years I’d been so skinny that the boys in school called me ‘bones.’”

But when the pictures came back, Jane was “thrilled. I didn’t look so skinny after all. Tom Kelley was some photographer.” – He was indeed.

One of those shots Kelley took wound up in the possession of a hustling agent by the name of Levis Green. He later explained that he had swiped Jane’s photo from Kelley’s office and, as he made his usual rounds of the studios, showed it to casting directors. No interest until Green showed her picture to a representative of Howard Hughes.

“She looks like the type,” the Hughes man commanded. “Bring her in.”

Jane was indeed being considered for the leading female part in the 1940 production of “The Outlaw,” to be directed by Howard Hawks.

At her first meeting with Hawks, the director explained the part was of a girl “who was half-Irish and half-Mexican” whose brother had been killed by Billy the Kid, and “she hated his guts. When she tries to kill him with a pitchfork, he rapes her.”

Said director Hawks: “We’ll be testing Monday, so learn the scene, and good luck.” This is how Jane Russell’s career spanning 24 movies over 27 years began.

Tomorrow we’ll have Part II of our blog on Jane Russell, and some of it will be quite gossipy. Promise. So please stay tuned.

Hello everybody. MRS. Norman Maine is out looking for her husband, but Mr. Joe Morella and Mr. Frank Segers are back again.

Today we have a REAL mystery. We can across this snap of Donald Gordon with someone we can’t identify and we’re hoping you out there can help. At first we thought he was one of the Dead End kids, but we’ve ruled that out. His face is so familiar, yet we can’t place him. Can You?

Here are the Dead End Kids with John Garfield and Gloria Dickson in a scene from “They Made Me A Criminal.”

1937’s “Dead End” had gotten the boys contracts at Warner Brothers. That gritty social drama set in New York City during the Great Depression starred Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea, Sylvia Sidney and Claire Trevor (cast as prostitute dying of syphilis). But the picture is perhaps most notable today for introducing moviegoers to a gaggle of juvenile toughs known as the Dead End Kids.

Bogie made three movies with the Dead End kids: 1938’s “Crime School” and “Angels With Dirty Faces” (two of the six films he made that year), and 1939’s “Invisible Stripes” (one of the seven films he made that year). The Dead End kids post-Bogie went on to star in several crime melodramas for Warner Bros., as well as a series at poverty row studio Monogram where they were called The East Side Kids and a later The Bowery Boys.

Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall were the two most identifable ”kids” (though they were in their twenties.) How many of the Dead End Kids are you able to identify in this picture? And who is our mystery man (boy) with Donald?

Pop Quiz: Another star was brought out to Hollywood to recreate her role as Bogie’s mother in Dead End. She went on to play other famous “Ma” roles. who was she?

Morella and Segers back again with more dish on Marlon Brando and his weight problems.

By the 1960’s when Brando was in his 40’s he took to wearing a poncho in hot weather to conceal his by then flabby body.

In Brando’s autobiography (“Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me,” written with Robert Lindsey), the actor writes that he developed a love of fattening foods because “when I was a kid, I’d come home from school to find my mother gone and the dishes in the sink. I’d feel low and open the icebox, and there would be an apple pie, along with some cheese, and the pie would say: ‘C’mon, Marlon, take me out. I’m freezing in here. Be a pal and take me out, and bring out Charlie Cheese, too.’ Then I’d feel less lonely.”

Well documented is Brando’s girth upon arriving in the Philippines to shoot his memorable cameo in Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

Eleanor Coppola’s “Notes,” the director’s wife’s book about the making of the film, records the shock of the director and crew at how overweight Brando was. Considerable measures were made necessary to conceal his girth during the shooting. One estimate is that he weighed 250 pounds minimum at the time. No wonder Brando as the unhinged Colonel Kurtz is photographed from the neck up in darkly lit scenes.

By this time, Brando was 55, and the die was cast for the rest of his life. He was apparently resigned to his obesity much as another cinematic figure — also declared a genius very early in his career – was in his final years.

“Think of Orson Welles,” author David Thomson has said, “a midwesterner too, who lost his mother when he was nine, an orphan by sixteen, brilliant, far smarter than Brando. And somehow when he had ‘Citizen Kane’ on one arm and Rita Hayworth on the other, he ate himself to a size where he could not always get out of a limousine.”

At least Welles had the excuse that he dined on irresistible haut cuisine served in Europe for much of his middle career. By contrast, stories abounded that Brando late in his life would arrange to have sacks full of McDonald’s cheeseburgers delivered to his rambling, multi-structure spread high in the Hollywood Hills.

The only conclusion we can reach about all this: put a highly self-indulgent genius, a taste for the most un-nutritious food and, most importantly, no one around to say “no” and mean it, it’s a wonder Brando made it to 80. The cause of his death was reported as respiratory failure compounded by congestive heart failure, diabetes and liver cancer.

Still in all, fat or not, Brando left an enormous mark. As Joe and co-author Edward Z. Epstein wrote in their 1971 book, “Rebels: The Rebel Hero in Films,” the actor’s “impact as a rebel and as a movie star was so great that no other actor of the fifties and sixties could escape comparison.”

YESTERDAY’S PIC: Brando the hunk. Today’s photo shows the more mature actor. We just couldn’t bear to run a picture of the really obese Marlon Brando. Let’s remember him in one of his 50′s films, shall we?

Take a close look at the accompanying Marlon Brando beefcake from Joe’s extensive photo collection.

The picture was taken, we suspect, in the actor’s stage years in the late 1940’s, probably around the time that he starred in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” This was before he galvanized audiences worldwide in the 1951 movie version.

It was reported at the time that Brando used to pump himself up before each performance by grinding out dozens of pushups. Whatever, there’s no denying the guy looks gorgeous. Brando was not a tall man — around 5 feet 9 – but he certainly made inch count. At least in this photo.

Now, if you have a strong stomach, take a look at Page 616 of author Darwin Porter’s scabrous 2006 biography of the actor, “Brando Unzipped” (subtitled “Bad Boy, Megastar, Sexual Outlaw”). The photo, probably taken by an intrusive papparazzo armed with a telephone lens, might shock you.

It shows an elderly Brando – he died July 1, 2004, aged 80 – standing by a window clad only in sagging briefs. He displays an enormous midsection, pendulous breasts with gobs of flesh handing from his extended arms. Only the famous face is recognizable. Above the photo is the caption, “Adieux.”

That the actor appears grotesquely obese would be an understatement. By the mid-1990’s, it’s reported that Brando weighed easily over 300 pounds.

How exactly did Brando make the journey from the svelte figure in the photo shown here to that pathetic figure in his dotage in front of the window? Was it the all-too-familiar ravages of age and easy living? Or, what it something else?

We decided to do a little research to try and answer this question, or at least come up with a reasonably plausible explanation.

Brando was born April 3, 1924, so by the time that the photo shown here was taken, he was about 25. And, as we all know, we tend to look better when we are young. But the actor’s battle of the bulge began relatively early.

An indication that the actor was losing his grip on the calorie count comes through loudly and clearly in the 1957 New Yorker magazine profile written by Truman Capote. In typically acidic fashion, according to Porter, Capote paints Brando “as an overweight, self-indulgent movie star pretending to be on a diet while stuffing himself with French fries, spaghetti and apple pie.”

Obviously, Brando loved to eat. The conventional wisdom has evolved that this was caused by stress.

More Tomorrow.

YESTERDAY’S PIC:

As you’ve probably guessed by now, that was Roger Moore pictured with Lana Turner, his costar in the 1956 MGM costume drama “Diane.”

Set in 16th century France, the movie had Lana in the starring role as a royal advisor who falls in love with the King’s young son, played by a Moore. The couple was an appealing screen match despite their age difference: Lana was 35, Roger 29. “Diane” shows off Lana’s fencing skills, and Moore without his shirt. He plays a ruffian royal heir – tamed by Lana, of course — with a taste for Greco-Roman wrestling. Judging by the evidence in this Cinemascope spectacular, Moore could have used a bit more time in the gym.

Moore went on to star in the internationally popular British tv series “The Saint,” playing suave spy Simon Templar. The series began in 1962, and lasted until 1969. Four years later, the British actor took over from Sean Connery the James Bond role in the fabulously successful feature film series, beginning with “Live and Let Die” and running through “A View To A Kill” in 1985, when Moore felt at 58 he was a bit long in the tooth to portray Ian Fleming’s dashing romantic hero.

Can you identify the actor shown with Lana Turner in this movie publicity still?

Not easy, we admit. The guy appears almost baby-faced. (He was in his late twenties when this staged photo was taken.) The faux-Elvis-style haircut doesn’t help either.

The presence of older-by-six-years Lana, who looks a tad spacey in this shot, is a giant hint. These two made only one movie together. Another hint is the headline of today’s blog.

Our man was an only child, an athletic swimmer and someone who loved school. Nonetheless his formal schooling ended when he was 15 when he went to work for a maker of animated cartoon films. After joining the studio workers’ union, he was fired.

He was injured during World War II military service but not in combat. A car accident left him with a split jaw and serious head injuries. Before being discharged, our man spent months in a German hospital.

He’s big pals with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

He has survived prostate cancer, kidney stones and heart problems.

He is still working.

OK, now. Who is this guy with Lana?

YESTERDAY’S PIC: From left to right were Lloyd Bridges, Dana Andrews, Richard Conte and Norman Lloyd, with John Ireland on the ground in “A Walk in the Sun” — one of the best combat films of all time.

Today we all – notably including our esteemed Books to Movies contributor Larry Michie – have our say about one of the best movies to come out of World War II.

We wonder if it IS the best. What do you think? What is your personal favorite WW II movie?

First, a few words from Michael Caine:

“British war films were always about officers; American films were about enlisted men.”

Caine is right, and no movie better illustrates his observation about officers versus enlisted men in American movies better than “A Walk In The Sun,” made by 20th Century Fox, directed by Lewis Milestone (nee Lev Milstein) and released in January 1945. (A freshly minted DVD of the film came out a year ago from VCI Entertainment.)

The movie has an all-star cast of character actors (George Tynes, Herbert Rudley, Sterling Holloway, Huntz Hall, Norman Lloyd, Steve Brodie and a very young-looking Lloyd Bridges) aided by bigger stars, Dana Andrews, John Ireland and Richard Conte — all portraying dog faces. After a hapless lieutenant’s face is blown away in the movie’s opening scenes, not a single officer appears in the rest of the movie.

A “Walk In The Sun” tracks an Army platoon in the 1943 Italian campaign from a Salerno beach landing through an assault on a bridge and a rural farmhouse infested with German machine gunners. There are bursts of action but equally emphasized are the personality quirks of each GI, even their interior monologues. Ireland’s Pfc Windy Crave, for example, mentally composes letters from the battlefield to a female cousin. (We know this because we hear his voiceover narration of what he is composing.)

The movie is based on a book written by Harry Brown, originally published in 1944 by Alfred A Knopf Inc., and reprinted in 1998 by First Bison Books, Univ. of Nebraska Press.

HERE’S LARRY: To judge by the heavyweight endorsements of Harry Brown’s WWII short novel “A Walk in the Sun,” the book is a major prize.

It was published a year before the movie came out. The New York Times said it was one of the most honest books to come out of World War II. The New Yorker called it “A book that is a book — natural, deeply moving, funny, and soundly American.”

Orville Prescott, writing in the Yale Review, said, “Harry Brown knows human character so intimately and has such superb powers as a writer that he can portray men in battle wonderfully well, better than has any other author writing of the Second World War of whom I have a knowledge.”

John Hersey said, “The book is by a soldier who is also a poet, and it is very good indeed.” It better be good after all that praise…

Well, the book was right on target, and so was the movie, although both naturally show their age. The men who landed on Salerno and helped close the Italian phase of the war are portrayed honestly in both media, although it now takes one aback to frequently have one soldier say to another, “You kill me.” That was a way of saying “You make me laugh,” but it’s kind of odd when enemy machine guns are in action.

The new DVD of the movie is worth a look. It’s in good shape and has had elements restored that were dropped from earlier prints.

The movie has some dated styles, but is true to the book and certainly catches the weary truths of the long grind of a miserable war. The story begins with an excellent depiction of the fears and horrors of an amphibious landing. The platoon’s new lieutenant is killed while taking a foolish look over the landing craft’s bow.

There are several other casualties by the time the platoon is hunkered down on land, and the upshot is that a sergeant, played by Dana Andrews, is in charge of leading the platoon on a six-mile walk. Their objective: Kill any Germans in a targeted farmhouse and destroy a nearby bridge.

The platoon succeeds, at considerable loss of life. One aspect of the plot and its success that appeals to me is that there is no certainty at all that the capture of the farmhouse and the destruction of the bridge was of any significance whatever.

The long-suffering soldiers had a job to do and they did it, so don’t think too hard about how necessary the orders might or might not have been. The narrator was perfect: Burgess Meredith.

FRANKS SAYS: I have been smitten with “Walk In The Sun” for decades now (I am not entirely sure I did not catch the movie upon its original theatrical release).

I love the poetic touches spoken in the movie by John Ireland and in the book by the sergeant portrayed in the film version by Dana Andrews, one of my very favorite actors. The combat action seems credible to me, and so does most of the profanity-free GI talk, albeit mild-mannered by today’s screen standards, from screenwriter Robert Rossen

HERE’S JOE: As coauthor of “The Films of World War II” (The Citadel Press, 1973), Joe surveyed nearly 100 wartime titles and found that “’A Walk in the Sun’ hit the core of what must have actually happened in countless small encounters on battlefields wherever fighting men met the enemy…

“(The film) concerns itself intimately and in close-up with the men involved, with their thoughts and feelings. It was a compelling and honest account of humans caught in the mill of an inhuman situation.”

Hello Everybody. We’re back again with a photo contributed by one of our readers. Pat Williamson, who a few weeks ago shared a photo of herself with legendary Marlene Dietrich, thought we might like to see this photo of her late husband, Hugh, when he appeared with Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen in the Disney classic “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”

How many of you still have, or at least remember, your coon skip caps? Speaking of hats, Pat remembered that the actors had to provide their own wardrobe and Hugh had to go out and shop for his hat.

LAST FRIDAY’S PIC: That was Gig Young nee Byron Barr. Young is best remembered as the sadistic master of ceremonies in director Sydney Pollack’s Depression-era, marathon-dancing film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” – for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1969.

The Academy Award somehow didn’t result in the career jolt that Young had hoped for. He appeared in only four films after that in nondescript supporting roles.

Young was obviously a deeply troubled man. Alcoholism marred his career and his five marriages, especially the last. Weeks after wedding German actress Kim Schmidt in 1978, Young shot her to death in their New York City apartment, and then fatally shot himself.

We wonder if his life would have turned out better had he lived it as Byron Barr.

Hello everybody. Mrs. Norman Maine is out looking for the man that got away. But Mr. Joe Morella and Mr. Frank Segers are here, still chatting about classic movies and movie stars.

We all know Whoopie Goldberg appropriated her name from whoopie cushion back when she was a stand up comic, and that Nicholas Gage (nee Coppola, he’s FFC’s nephew) took his from a cartoon character, Luke Cage. But it’s fun to learn about actors who took their names from characters they portrayed.

Pictured above is Byron Barr.

You might remember him as an extra and bit player at Warner Brothers where he was often unbilled or occasionally listed as Byron Barr. But in the 1942 film “The Gay Sisters” costarring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent and Geraldine Fitzgerald, he played a character called Gig Young – and guess what? The studio and Barr decided they liked that name better than the Byron Elsworth Barr monicker he was born with in 1913.

Young certainly wasn’t the first nor the last actor to do this. It probably started with Moliere’s troupe, or maybe even the Greeks. In Young’s case, he was under some name-change pressure unknown to his classical predecessors because another actor was billed at the time as Byron Barr. (The Screen Actors Guild frowns on the use of the same name by any two performers.)

“The Gay Sisters” not only gave him a new name but provided Young’s career a much-needed push. As a result, he happily gave up his part time job as a gas station attendant to concentrate on making movies full time. After service in the Coast Guard during World War II, Young returned to Hollywood and carved out a solid career in mostly light secondary leading roles.

Back in 1934 a child actress, Dawn O’Day (who’d been born Dawn Evelyn Paris), starred in a film version of the classic “Anne of Green Gables,” and everafter called herself the name of the character she’d played, Anne Shirley.

Shirley didn’t make many films remembered today except perhaps for director King Vidor’s renowned 1937 tearjerker “Stella Dallas,” where she portrayed Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter; and in 1944, Edward Dmytryk’s hard boiled “Murder, My Sweet.” In that, her last film, she played the “good” girl opposite Dick Powell’s version of Philip Marlow. Claire Trevor was her evil stepmother.

Shirley was married briefly to John Payne (who once had a flaming romance with Jane Russell) and their daughter, Julie Payne, became an actress.

YESTERDAY’S PIC: A snapshot from the Donald Gordon Collection shows Dorothy Lamour signing an autograph for a fan. In the good ole days stars were always happy to meet and talk with their fans. (except Garbo, of course, who reputedly didn’t even talk to her co-stars. Frederick March once said, “Making a film with Greta Garbo does not constitute an introduction.”) Dottie loved her fans and they were devoted to her.

After a series of meetings and conversations between Joe and Dorothy about a possible book project, it became clear that her re-emergence on the show biz scene in the 1980′s — which astonished much of show business at the time — was primarily driven by one thing.

Dorothy needed the money, she confessed to Joe.

Like many women of her age and time, she had absented herself from the finances of her family, leaving such matters to her businessman husband.

After he passed she discovered that all their credit cards had been maxed out. That all their stock had been sold. That her husband had cashed in his life insurance. That there was little if any money left.

Dorothy was urged to file for personal bankruptcy.” No,” she said.” I’ll go back to work and pay all my debts.” And that’s exactly what she did.

Fortunately her step-son, William Ross Howard IV, knew enough about the entertainment business to take over as Dorothy’s agent. At first the only job available was a supporting role in an El Paso dinner theatre’s production of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park”.

GASP! IS THAT DOROTHY LAMOUR ??

Lamour told Joe that her most horrible moment occurred when she walked onstage for the first time, and was greeted with a collective gasp from the audience. Naively expecting to see a youthful, sarong-draped Dorothy out of her earliest movies, audiences had to visually adjust to the deliberately frumpy-looking actress in her mid-Sixties playing the mother of a new bride.

But with Dorothy’s name, the offers soon came flooding in. What began as nervously tentative return driven by financial desperation quickly turned into late-career show business triumph.

Lamour suggested to Joe that her financial predicament could provide the makings of a wonderful new book with Dorothy the centerpiece representing so many women of her generation who had blissfully left finances to husbands only to find themselves financially stranded after their mates departed. There was a real story here!

All across America there were thousands of women in their 50s, 60s and 70s who, when their “upper middle income” or even “rich” husbands died, found out they had in fact been living in a financial house of cards. There WERE no stocks, investments or bank accounts that these women could fall back on.

Without a movie star name to back them up, these women were forced to return to the work force often as waitresses, restaurant hostesses or sales clerks. Writing a book with Dorothy about how such women cope in such pressing circumstances seemed to Joe to be a worthy and most interesting project.

Joe whipped up a four-page book proposal, and took it to several New York publishers. One, the late Lyle Stuart, snapped it up. He told Joe he was buying the book idea at least partially because Lamour was the first movie star he had fallen in love with. (Stuart had never forgotten seeing as a young teenager Dorothy in 1936’s “The Jungle Princess.” Ah, that sarong!)

And, Stuart was savvy enough to realize the potential of a book about a famous Hollywood star experiencing the same distressing situation as an average housewife confronting the reality that dear departed husband had spent all the money, leaving a pile of debts in his wake. (Similar fates befell, by the way, Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds.)

But over time, Lamour began to get cold feet. Would this book be too revealing?

She finally made it clear to Joe that the subject of her financial straits was something much too personal — not so much about her personal distress but about the negative effect public disclosure might have on the memory of a man she had loved for more than three decades.

To Joe’s regret to this day, the book project with Dorothy never came to be. (Dorothy continued working into the late 1980’s. She even appeared as a disheveled housewife who gets bumped off in the horror movie“Creep Show 2.”)

She died in her North Hollywood home of a heart attack on Sept. 22, 1996. She was 81. Dorothy is remembered in many ways including her two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for her movies and another for her radio shows. By most accounts she was pretty well off financially at the end.

YESTERDAY’S PIC: Dottie with Bob Hope and Joan Collins on one of Hope’s TV Specials. Collins had the female lead in the last of the Road movies with Hope and Crosby. Hope saw to it that Lamour got a cameo in the film, “The Road to Hong Kong.”

Hello everybody. Morella and Segers still at it. Joe continues with his story about Paramount star Dorothy Lamour.

Although she was in C. B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show On Earth” Dorothy Lamour’s career as a leading actress essentially ended after 1952’s “The Road to Bali.” Ten year later when Dorothy’s career was a fading memory to most movie fans, a final road pic“The Road To Hong Kong” was made with Hope and Crosby. But Joan Collins took the leading lady role, not Dorothy.

The by-then 48-year-old Lamour was incensed by what she regarded as a casting affront, and took her case to Hollywood columnist, Louella Parsons. To placate the public and because she was still a great friend of Bob Hope’s, the studio carved out a cameo in “Hong Kong” in which Dorothy played herself and sang a song in a nightclub setting.

The upside of all this was that Dorothy’s appearance in the movie drew the attention of none other than director John Ford, who a year later cast her in a supporting role in “Donovan’s Reef,” an action vehicle for John Wayne and Lee Marvin. And this movie appearance in turn led to some late-Sixties stage work.

So, the result of Dorothy’s casting beef wound up giving her career a bit of a boost.

There’s no question that after 1952, Dorothy Lamour spent less time on her career and more and more time on her marriage to William Ross Howard III, with whom she had two children and shared a step son. The couple, married in 1943, stayed together until his death.

He met Dorothy when he was in the service during WW II and she was a Hollywood star promoting war bonds with great gusto and success (the “Bond Bombshell” was personally credited for closing the sales on some $21 million – a staggering amount at the time – in war bonds). She was with Bob Hope entertaining the troops on Hope’s first of what would become his legendary trips.

William Howard was a dashing, aristocratic officer in uniform. Dorothy Lamour was the patriotic beauty of solid, traditional values (Dorothy was Roman Catholic). They fell in love, got married and presumably lived happily ever after. And that seemed to be that. (Although Dorothy starred in the 1968 national road show of “Hello, Dolly,” her family life came first and she remained largely a homemaker.)

By all accounts the union was a happy one. Howard’s family came from of old line Maryland lineage (he and Dorothy lived during the 60’s and 70’s in a suburb of Towson), and Howard himself was described as a businessman with interests in the frozen food and advertising businesses.

Like much of the entertainment world, Joe was highly impressed with Lamour’s energetic re-emergence in the entertainment world following her husband’s death in early 1978.

All of a sudden, she was all over the place – on television (Bob Hope specials, “The Love Boat” and “Murder, She Wrote”) and in regional theater.

The question: was Lamour’s cover-all-bases showbiz return after nearly 35 years of domesticity just another example of a merry widow kicking up her heels? Joe wasn’t sure, so he dropped by Lamour’s home in North Hollywood during the 1980’s to find out. More about that tomorrow.

YESTERDAY’S PIC: Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in “My Favorite Brunette.” And she was. They remained life long friends.